How important is domain age for SEO?

Is there any actual correlation between a certain domain age and SEO efficiency in Google ranking promotion? This question about the Search Engine Optimization and how it can be correlated with a domain registration date is an important matter, frequently discussed by the expert webmasters, as well as many online business owners.

Most commonly, the industry gurus are concluding that a domain age and SEO outcomes are somehow acting hand-in-hand. By default, their current opinions on how great is domain age for SEO, are quite different, though still making some sense in their own way:

domain age has no influence on SEO, and hence on Google ranking at all

domain age is just an individual factor among the myriads of the other qualities included to Google’s sophisticated ranking algorithms

domain age plays a purely important role for taking the top position in the SERPs

Also, here are two crucial points behind the current discussion about domain age and SEO:

considering the logic that the spammers are used to put the new domains on a registry and quickly drop them, the newly registered names are more often employed by the spamming websites

by reverse logic, an old domain name would mean the website is good and worthy, as the well-established ones keep using the same domains for years

Well, we see a lot of uncertainty here. But one thing I can tell you for sure - the age of the domain does matter when considered with those owning it. I mean that when a domain owner got a long lasting and clean state in Google’s records, it won’t bring you at least a negative impact, should you decide to buy an existing and already used domain name. From the other hand, however, there are many “bad” domains, either previously identified as spam or even penalized by Google sometime before.

To prevent such an unfortunate course of events from happening, the experts recommend considering only those domains for sale, which got the public info available. Yes, the scammers might as well have some privacy protection, for example with Whois queries, I should admit. Nevertheless, that would certainly bring suspicion around them.

That way, I recommend having a double-check of the domain age and its history before making a deal. And there are many useful frameworks available in open access to check out when an individual domain name was registered. For example, you can try the Netcraft tool to find out when the domain was indexed by Google crawling bots for the first time. Doing so, you can identify the most promising domain names rated as trustworthy, as they have been awarded for their long-lasting quality results, and hence ranked well in the SERPs.

Note, however, my suggestion doesn’t mean at all that a newly-created domain name will be inevitably losing the battle against the older competitors, therefore having a weaker probability to climb to the top of the search results. “The older is the domain name you have, the higher ranking you will get” - that can’t be 100% valid anyway. Just keep in mind, that a period of good activity impacts the domain authority, we should admit. After all, however, a domain age with SEO can still drive the website ranking in their own way, both positive and adverse.